The new threshold for diabetes in pregnancy recently introduced by the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) misses a significant number of women at risk of serious complications, a report published ...

According to the World Health Organization, excessive alcohol drinking is the most common cause of cirrhosis worldwide. A new worldwide study presented at The International Liver CongressTM 2015 has shown the significant ...

According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women both in the developed and less developed world, and in the long term the scientists hope that the new method will lead to better ...

Cancer cells share certain traits with anti-social members of human society. They shirk community responsibilities and engage in behavior aimed at fulfilling their selfish needs at the expense of the greater good.

For more than a decade, scientists have had a working map of the human genome, a complete picture of the DNA sequence that encodes human life. But new pages are still being added to that atlas: maps of chemical markers called ...

The use of glycated haemoglobin (sugar-bound haemoglobin, or HbA1c) is now in almost universal use to assist doctors in the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. However new research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the ...

Visceral fat deposits around internal organs in the stomach are particularly harmful: they are associated with insulin resistance, type-2 diabetes and heart disease. The study, conducted in close collaboration with researchers ...

Organism

In biology, an organism is any living system (such as animal, plant, fungus, or micro-organism). In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homeostasis as a stable whole. An organism may either be unicellular (single-celled) or be composed of, as in humans, many billions of cells grouped into specialized tissues and organs. The term multicellular (many-celled) describes any organism made up of more than one cell.

The terms "organism" (Greek ὀργανισμός - organismos, from Ancient Greek ὄργανον - organon "organ, instrument, tool") first appeared in the English language in 1701 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary).

Scientific classification in biology considers organisms synonymous with life on Earth. Based on cell type, organisms may be divided into the prokaryotic and eukaryotic groups. The prokaryotes represent two separate domains, the Bacteria and Archaea. Eukaryotic organisms, with a membrane-bounded cell nucleus, also contain organelles, namely mitochondria and (in plants) plastids, generally considered to be derived from endosymbiotic bacteria. Fungi, animals and plants are examples of species that are eukaryotes.

More recently a clade, Neomura, has been proposed, which groups together the Archaea and Eukarya. Neomura is thought to have evolved from Bacteria, more specifically from Actinobacteria.